In a statement the UCI said it was satisfied the 11 riders it had cleared had fulfilled the criteria laid down by the International Olympic Committee on Sunday.
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“It is now time to put all doubts aside: the Russian team is going to the Olympics”. He said the most likely cause was what he called “organizational problems”.
Sergey Tetyukhin, the volleyball captain who won gold in London and will be Russia’s flag-bearer in Rio, similarly called for athletes to redouble their efforts in response to the doping scandal.
Team members left on a charter flight yesterday from Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport to Brazil, a day after an emotional farewell ceremony with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. “The Olympic Channel will inspire us all and reach out to new generations of athletes and fans”.
“You can’t break Russians”, she said.
Violent clashes between police and protesters during the Olympic torch relay have cast a shadow over the Rio Games, while a threatened metro strike raised fears of travel chaos.
The Russian gymnastics team were one of the first to arrive in Rio and Russian media has reported its national federation saying it was not expecting any problems with being allowed to compete.
Some 70 Russian competitors from the country’s depleted Olympics team flew out from Moscow for Rio on Thursday as sports federations whittled down the number of athletes allowed to take part. “We’re after medals, that’s it”, the handball player Anna Sen said.
Isinbayeva, a two-time Olympic gold-medalist, took her case to the Court of Arbitration in Sport to try and make her fourth Olympics, but was denied.
“We needed to show good results, to show that we would have looked good on the worldwide level”.
Officials for the state of Rio de Janeiro have said the government body is essentially “broke”, closing schools and hospitals, and delaying pension payments. “They (competitors in Rio) would probably have been afraid of us”. Worldwide sports federations must now remove any athlete previously banned for doping or who was implicated in last week’s McLaren report alleging a mass cover-up of failed drug tests.
But WADA officials have argued that the evidence of a systemic Russian government-sponsored doping program, along with efforts by Russian state officials to cover up doping violations by Russian athletes, should have been dealt with by imposing a blanket ban against all Russian athletes during the 2016 Olympics. “I think now the Russian team is the cleanest team in the world”.
“We would like to get concrete requirements [from athletics’ governing body] to restore Russia’s membership, so that no one can hit reverse later and say we didn’t fulfill the requirements”, he said.
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” Stop trying to ruin the Olympics for Us” Kalmoe states in her latest blog post.
